Robo-journalism: news automation is here

There are news stories being published right now which were generated by complex computer algorithms. They're mostly sport and finance news stories, but how far might robo-journalism take us in the future and what are the implications?

Transcript

Richard Aedy: This is the Media Report on RN. I’m Richard Aedy, not a robot. But it might happen one day if we follow similar trends now emerging in print and text. Autonomous software agents, robots, are now writing stories. This isn’t confirming some long held prejudice you may have about certain columnists. It’s really happening. Evgeny Morozov is a writer and researcher on technology. And as he explains via Skype, so far the software only works for some stories.

Evgeny Morozov: A lot here depends on whether the story you want to write follows a difficult pattern. To give an example, Forbes magazine now has a section on their website where they report on corporate earning statements. Every quarter companies are expected to release their statements and then the reports are written which follow a very typical standard template. So what happens is that a piece of software grabs data, you know the actual earnings somewhere on the internet whether it’s Google Finance or Yahoo Finance or some other, Bloomberg…Once that piece of software has grabbed that data then it needs to insert it into some kind of a template. And if there are some exceptional items, something that typically does not appear in an earning statement, this is where things get tricky because you cannot just plug in a number. So this is where you either need to teach your software to be more creative and look for a-typical clues, or you need to introduce a human who will then tinker with the story and make it look a bit more reasonable.

Richard Aedy: The other thing that computers can do better is that they can certainly do it cheaper. They can deliver almost anything that they’re equipped to, especially these essentially simple stories that revolve around key numbers, much more cheaply than a journalist can.

Evgeny Morozov: Well this is the promise that is made by people who run such companies; that essentially they offer a service that if you as a proprietor of a newspaper embrace it, it will spare you not just extra labour costs but that it will also free you from any concerns about insurance or maternity leaves and things like that, which happen to humans. I mean whether it will stay like that forever, or whether these companies will jack up their fees once newspapers get rid of their journalists remains to be seen. But I think it is a very interesting argument that’s made by such companies; that essentially writers who work on such low value stories if you will, can be replaced by journalists but then the money that is saved can then be shifted towards more analytic, more deeper investigative stories. So the pitch that such companies make—and I don’t entirely buy it, but that’s an argument that needs to be grappled with—the pitch that they make is that it will actually help to promote journalism. It will actually help to get journalists to focus on tasks that matter.

Richard Aedy: But your main concern is actually a broader one. It’s about how this kind of technology could affect all of us.

Evgeny Morozov: Well I think our media for several centuries now have functioned on an assumption of universality; that we all read the same stories and that we all have access to the same body of texts. Now with this new technology that is essentially capable of producing stories on the spot, it’s become possible for publishers to present different versions of the same story to different readers, depending on the inferred income, or the inferred reading ability or the inferred class or education—you name it. And of course creating such divergences in readership would not be bad for publishers because the better fit their product is to their readers, the more money they can charge in advertising. So what I fear is that such stories that can increasingly be written on demand, when combined with personalisation strategies of most publishers now, can actually result in a completely new media environment, where we’re not just seeing different articles about different subjects as was predicted, say, a decade ago by critics like Cass Sunstein [inaudible, not verified], but we would actually be seeing different versions of the same article.

And the example that I give in my Slate piece is of an article that deals with for example Angelina Jolie, the actress right? So imagine that the publisher, because they have access to my Facebook data or some other online data that I put up online, that the publisher knows that I am well educated, I have a job in a Ivy League university and that typically I also read a lot of very smart magazines; whether it’s New York Reviewof Books or Harpers or something else. So they know all of this about me, so the news article that I read about Angelina Jolie ends by mentioning her new film about the war in Bosnia. And suppose that there is a different reader who again the publisher knows to be less interested in international news and politics, who reads a lot of celebrity related news and gossip, and that person sees that article end with some gossip about Brad Pitt her husband instead of the war in Bosnia. This will be a miracle for advertisers because it will make everyone feel happy; me, that other person and the newspaper. But it will not necessarily be so good for civic discourse and this is one of the dangers that I think we need to be aware of in the context of this technology.

Richard Aedy: So the technology now means that it’s getting more difficult to read completely anonymously and because the people who put out the information know who we are and know what we’ve read in the past and know from social media the backgrounds—you’ve mentioned where you’ve gone to university or the other things you like to read—that means they give us more of what they think we want and we lose the, we lose the serendipity. It’s literally not in the algorithm.

Evgeny Morozov: You’re right it’s a confluence of two factors essentially; one of which is a demise of anonymous reading and that happens because there are incentives built into how we do things online that essentially reward us for revealing who we are and what we do. This is one development that I think we are more or less aware of. But the second development is trickier and that’s this ability to produce stories automatically and algorithmically, and to do it on the spot. I mean right now much of this on the spot production in publishing is limited to advertising. So I go to a website and the publisher knows who I am or where I’ve come from or what my Facebook credentials are so they generate a related app that essentially they think is something I will respond to with much greater probability than just a random generalised app that’s not connected to me. So you already have that happening in the advertising sector.

What I think we will see soon is the same trend happen in the publishing world where we will see stories that will be customised and produced on demand and on the fly. So once the publisher knows what my reading level is, what I’m interested in, how interested I am in, say, international politics, all the content will be customised. I mean the previous fear that we’ll just be presented different stories—so if I care about Africa but you care about, say, Hollywood, I will see a story about Africa and you’ll see a story about Hollywood—what I’m saying is that something else may be happening. You may be shown the same story at least that’s what the headline claims. But then the content will be different and it’s a very different environment both in terms of how we consume media but also how we interact in the political sphere from what we had 10 or 20 years ago.

Richard Aedy: Another ‘watch this space’ I think. Evgeny Morozov is a visiting scholar at Stanford University. He’s also at the New America Foundation. And you can read an article he wrote about this very idea in Slate.com You’ll find a link to it and to another one on the same topic at the website. Just go to abc.net.au/radionational. Have a look around. You’ll find us.

And do get in touch. Remember you can email us from the website. It’s very easy and we want to hear from you. We want your story ideas and what you think about what we’re doing.

Guests

Evgeny Morozov

Writer and visiting scholarStanford University Schwartz Fellow New America FoundationUnited States

Credits

Comments (2)

Andy :

30 Apr 2012 2:21:12pm

Robo-journalism has been around for years. It's called churnalism. Journalists should go on faux news detox diet, leave the newsroom and send all PR sourced media releases to the spam folder. Will any rise to the challange - even for a month?